Proudfoot, the keen, clever,
trusted, confidential agent of half the families around--to let his
wife know his shame and that of her brother, and to degrade his
daughter into the daughter of a felon--was more than he could bear;
and he had gone on trying to drown the sense of that one lapse in
the prosperity of his career and his efforts to place his daughter
in the first ranks of society. No doubt the having done an injury
to the Poynsett family had been the true secret of that enmity, more
than political, which he had always shown to Raymond; and after
thinking Gadley safer out of that office, and having yielded to his
solicitations and set him up at the Three Pigeons, he had been
almost compelled to bid for popularity by using his position as a
magistrate to protect the blackguardism of the town. He had been
meant for better things, and had been dragged on against his
conscience and judgment by the exigencies of his unhappy secret; and
when the daughter, for whose sake he had sacrificed his better self,
had only been led by her position into the follies and extravagances
of the worst part of the society into which she had been introduced,
and threw herself into the hands of a dissipated gambler, to whom
her fortune made her a desirable prey--truly his sin had found him
out.
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